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104-648: At the beginning of the 20th century, Pédret, a Spanish immigrant, arrives in the southwest French country side. He becomes a blacksmith and marries Augustine, the daughter of the village baker. By 1936 Pédret’s forge has become a foundry where his three sons are the managers. Years later when Augustine, now a bourgeois matriarch, realizes that her son Hector is having an affair with Berthe, a lowly seamstress, she tries to ruin Berthe’s business and drive her out of town even if it means bribing her. But old Pédret, who knows that his sons have their spirits broken, can see that Berthe has

208-456: A caméra-stylo " . In 1960 Godard shot Le petit soldat ( The Little Soldier ). The cast included Godard's future wife Anna Karina . At this time Karina had virtually no experience as an actress. Godard used her awkwardness as an element of her performance. Godard and Karina were a couple by the end of the shoot. She appeared again, along with Belmondo, in Godard's first color film, A Woman Is

312-416: A humanist rather than Marxist perspective." Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky , both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville . His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as Vivre sa vie (1962), Bande à part (1964) and Pierrot le Fou (1965)—were called "arguably

416-510: A photojournalist who has links with a right-wing paramilitary group working for the French government, is ordered to murder a professor accused of aiding the Algerian resistance. He is in love with Veronica Dreyer, a young woman who has worked with the Algerian fighters. He is captured by Algerian militants and tortured. His organisation captures and tortures her. In making Le petit soldat , Godard took

520-553: A Woman (1961), their first project to be released. The film was intended as a homage to the American musical . Adjustments that Godard made to the original version of the story gave it autobiographical resonances, "specifically in regard to his relationship with Anna Karina." The film revealed "the confinement within the four walls of domestic life" and "the emotional and artistic fault lines that threatened their relationship". Godard's next film, Vivre sa vie ( My Life to Live , 1962),

624-741: A boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949. He registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), but did not attend class. In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, ciné-clubs (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs—the Cinémathèque Française , Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), Work and Culture ciné club, and others—which became his regular haunts. The Cinémathèque

728-619: A companion piece to Tout va bien , the pair made Letter to Jane , a 50-minute "examination of a still" showing Jane Fonda visiting with the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War . The film is a deconstruction of Western imperialist ideology. This was the last film that Godard and Gorin made together. In 1978 Godard was commissioned by the Mozambican government to make a short film. During this time his experience with Kodak film led him to criticise

832-407: A concrete physical narration to follow, or discontinuous, causing viewer disorientation, pondering, or even subliminal interpretation or reaction, as in the montage style. An ellipsis is an apparent break in natural time continuity as it is implied in the film's story. The simplest way to maintain temporal continuity is to shoot and use all action involved in the story's supposed duration whether it

936-481: A feature film. He travelled to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and asked Truffaut to let him use the story on which they had collaborated in 1956, about car thief Michel Portail. He sought money from producer Georges de Beauregard , whom he had met previously while working briefly in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox 's Paris office, and who was also at the Festival. Beauregard could offer his expertise, but

1040-443: A film critic for the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma , Godard criticised mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which de-emphasised innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema . Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature Breathless , helping to establish

1144-490: A film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word 'scandal' and the 'freedom' that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification , of pop art derision at consumerism, and of a feminist denunciation of women's false 'liberation', was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story." The way Godard treated politics in his cinematic period

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1248-503: A group of students and engaged with the ideas coming out of the student activist groups in contemporary France. Released just before the May 1968 events , the film is thought by some to have foreshadowed the student rebellions that took place. That same year, Godard made a more colourful and political film, Week End . It follows a Parisian couple as they leave on a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect an inheritance. What ensues

1352-401: A grown man in the story present, a cut to a young boy being addressed by the man's name occurs, the viewer can assume that the young boy scene depicts time previous to the story present. The young boy scene would be a flashback. The montage technique is one that implies no real temporal continuity whatsoever. Montage is achieved with a collection of symbolically related images, cut together in

1456-663: A homage to Jean Cocteau . The film was shot in Godard's hotel room on the rue de Rennes and apparently reflected something of the 'romantic austerity' of Godard's own life at this time. His Swiss friend Roland Tolmatchoff noted: "In Paris he had a big Bogart poster on the wall and nothing else." In December 1958, Godard reported from the Festival of Short Films in Tours and praised the work of, and became friends with, Jacques Demy , Jacques Rozier , and Agnès Varda —he already knew Alain Resnais whose entry he praised—but Godard now wanted to make

1560-515: A lightweight handheld camera and a minimum of added lighting; Coutard had experience as a documentary cameraman while working for the French army's information service in Indochina during the French-Indochina War . Tracking shots were filmed by Coutard from a wheelchair pushed by Godard. Though Godard had prepared a traditional screenplay, he dispensed with it and wrote the dialogue day by day as

1664-547: A movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart —from The Harder They Fall , his last film (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate)—visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman , Samuel Fuller , Fritz Lang , and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures , an American B-movie studio. Quotations from, and references to literature, include William Faulkner , Dylan Thomas , Louis Aragon , Rilke , Françoise Sagan , and Maurice Sachs . The film also contains citations in images or on

1768-451: A petty criminal, Michel Portail, who had shot a motorcycle policeman and whose girlfriend had turned him in to the police, but Truffaut failed to interest any producers. Another project with Truffaut, a comedy about a country girl arriving in Paris, was also abandoned. He worked with Rohmer on a planned series of short films centering on the lives of two young women, Charlotte and Véronique; and in

1872-805: A pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut , Agnès Varda , Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy . He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era . According to AllMovie , his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity , sound , and camerawork . His most acclaimed films include Breathless (1960), Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Band of Outsiders (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966), Weekend (1967) and Goodbye to Language (2014). During his early career as

1976-661: A postmodern production of the play by William Shakespeare . Also completed in 1987 was a segment in the film Aria which was based loosely from the plot of Armide ; it is set in a gym and uses several arias by Jean-Baptiste Lully from his famous Armide . His later films were marked by great formal beauty and frequently a sense of requiem: Nouvelle Vague ( New Wave , 1990), the autobiographical JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre ( JLG/JLG: Self-Portrait in December , 1995), and For Ever Mozart (1996). Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro ( Germany Year 90 Nine Zero , 1991) which

2080-463: A series of innovative video works for European broadcast television, titled Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication (1976) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978). From the time that Godard returned to mainstream filmmaking in 1980, Anne-Marie Miéville remained an important collaborator. After the events of May 1968 , when the city of Paris saw a total upheaval in response to the "authoritarian de Gaulle ", and Godard's professional objective

2184-418: A shot of someone tossing a ball can be edited to show two different views, while maintaining temporal continuity by being sure that the second shot shows the arm of the subject in the same stage of its motion as it was left when cutting from the first shot. The temporal discontinuity can be expressed by the deliberate use of ellipses. Cutting techniques useful in showing the nature of the specific ellipses are

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2288-770: A stiff anti-war metonym . In addition to the international conflicts to which Godard sought an artistic response, he was also very concerned with the social problems in France. The earliest and best example of this is Karina's potent portrayal of a prostitute in Vivre sa vie . In 1960s Paris, the political milieu was not overwhelmed by one specific movement. There was, however, a distinct post-war climate shaped by various international conflicts such as colonialism in North Africa and Southeast Asia. Godard's Marxist disposition did not become abundantly explicit until La Chinoise and Week End , but

2392-571: A success— The New York Times ' s critic called her a "misplaced amateur"—but Truffaut and Godard disagreed. In the role of Michel Poiccard, Godard cast Belmondo, an actor he had already called, writing in Arts in 1958, "the Michel Simon and the Jules Berry of tomorrow." The cameraman was Raoul Coutard , choice of the producer Beauregard. Godard wanted Breathless to be shot like a documentary, with

2496-459: A total of five films with strong Maoist messages. The most prominent film from the collaboration was Tout Va Bien (1972). The film starred Jane Fonda , who was, at the time, the wife of French filmmaker Roger Vadim . Fonda was at the height of her acting career, having won an Academy Award for her performance in Klute (1971), and had gained notoriety as a left-wing anti-war activist. The male lead

2600-400: A way that suggests psychological relationships rather than a temporal continuum. Just as important as temporal continuity to the overall continuity of a film is spatial continuity. And like temporal continuity, it can be achieved several ways: the establishing shot , the 180-degree rule , the eye-line match , and match on action . The establishing shot is one that provides a view of all

2704-409: Is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie . The film contains an eight-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, cited as a technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends. Startlingly, a few shots contain extra footage from, as it were, before the beginning of the take (while the actors are preparing) and after

2808-513: Is a first cousin of former Prime Minister and later President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski . Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland. At the outbreak of the Second World War , Godard was in France, and returned to Switzerland with difficulty. He spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on

2912-498: Is a quasi-sequel to Alphaville , but done with an elegiac tone and focus on the inevitable decay of age. In 1990 , Godard was presented with a special award from the National Society of Film Critics . Between 1988 and 1998, he produced the multi-part series Histoire(s) du cinéma , a monumental project which combined all the innovations of his video work with a passionate engagement in the issues of twentieth-century history and

3016-480: Is a relocation of time within a story, or more accurately, a window through which the viewer can see what happened at a time before that considered (or assumed) to be the story present. A flashback makes its time-frame evident through the scene's action or the use of common archetypes such as sepia toning, the use of home-movie style footage, period costume or even through obvious devices such as clocks and calendars or direct character linkage. For example, if after viewing

3120-479: Is believed to be suppressed by the computer. His next film was Pierrot le Fou (1965). Gilles Jacob , an author, critic, and president of the Cannes Film Festival , called it both a "retrospective" and recapitulation. He solicited the participation of Jean-Paul Belmondo , by then a famous actor, to guarantee the necessary amount of funding for the expensive film. Godard said the film was "connected with

3224-532: Is considered groundbreaking in its own right, the period stands in contrast to that which immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema's history as bourgeois and therefore without merit. Godard's Breathless ( À bout de souffle , 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg , distinctly expressed the French New Wave 's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture—specifically American film noir . The film employed various techniques such as

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3328-401: Is constant in the film. It opens with a long, ponderous montage of war images that occasionally lapses into the comic; Paradise is shown as a lush wooded beach patrolled by U.S. Marines . Continuity editing Continuity editing is the process, in film and video creation, of combining more-or-less related shots, or different components cut from a single shot, into a sequence to direct

3432-485: Is evident in several films—namely Pierrot and Une femme mariée . Godard was accused by some of harbouring anti-Semitic views: in 2010, in the lead-up to the presentation of Godard's honorary Oscar, a prominent article in The New York Times by Michael Cieply drew attention to the idea, which had been circulating through the press in previous weeks, that Godard might be an anti-Semite, and thus undeserving of

3536-478: Is free to raise or lower them as she wishes. The film was a popular success and led to Columbia Pictures giving him a deal where he would be provided with $ 100,000 to make a movie, with complete artistic control. Le petit soldat was not released until 1963, the first of three films he released that year. Le petit soldat dealt with the Algerian War of Independence . It was banned by the French government for

3640-463: Is pertinent or not. It would also be necessary to shoot the whole film in one take to keep from having to edit together different shots, causing the viewer's temporal disorientation. However, in a story that is to occupy long periods of time, a viewer would have to spend too long watching the film. So although in many cases the ellipsis would prove necessary, elimination of it altogether would best preserve any film's temporal continuity. Diegetic sound

3744-408: Is sometimes thought to depict a wholly masculine point of view, Phillip John Usher has demonstrated how the film, by the way it connects images and disparate events, seems to blur gender lines. Godard followed with Made in U.S.A (1966), the source material for which was Richard Stark 's The Jugger . A classic New Wave crime thriller, it was inspired by American Noir films. Anna Karina stars as

3848-405: Is that which is to have occurred within the story during the action being viewed. It is sound that comes from within the narrative world of a film (including off-screen sound). Continuous diegetic sound helps to smooth temporally questionable cuts by overlapping the shots. Here the logic is that if a sonic occurrence within the action of the scene has no breaks in time, then it would be impossible for

3952-433: The 180-degree rule . The rule prevents the camera from crossing the imaginary line connecting the subjects of the shot. Another method is the eye-line match. When shooting a human subject, he or she can look towards the next subject to be cut to, thereby using the former's self as a reference for the viewer to use while locating the new subject within the set. With the establishing shot, 180-degree rule, eye-line match, and

4056-467: The Algerian War of Independence , was notable for its attempt to present the complexity of the dispute; the film was perceived as equivocating and as drawing a "moral equivalence" between the French forces and the National Liberation Front . Along these lines, Les Carabiniers presents a fictional war that is initially romanticized in the way its characters approach their service, but becomes

4160-810: The Holocaust in a context suggesting he considers Nazism and the Holocaust as the nadir of human history. Godard's views become more complex regarding the State of Israel . In 1970, Godard travelled to the Middle East to make a pro-Palestinian film he did not complete and whose footage eventually became part of the 1976 film Ici et ailleurs . In this film, Godard seems to view the Palestinians ' cause as one of many worldwide Leftist revolutionary movements. Elsewhere, Godard explicitly identified himself as an anti-Zionist but denied

4264-576: The May 68 upheaval, Godard, alongside François Truffaut , led protests that shut down the 1968 Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with the students and workers. Godard stated there was not a single film showing at the festival that represented their causes. "Not one, whether by Milos , myself, Roman or François. There are none. We're behind the times." Amid the upheavals of the late 1960s, Godard became passionate about "making political films politically." Though many of his films from 1968 to 1972 are feature-length films, they are low-budget and challenge

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4368-572: The dissolve and the fade. Other editing styles can show a reversal of time or even an abandonment of it altogether. These are the flashback and montage techniques, respectively. A fade is a gradual transformation of an image to or back from black. A dissolve is a simultaneous overlapping transition from one shot to another that does not involve an instantaneous cut or change in brightness. Both forms of transition (fade and dissolve) create an ambiguous measure of ellipsis that may constitute diagetic (narrative) days, months, years or even centuries. Through

4472-430: The 1950s force her to turn to an unlikely source for financial help: her obnoxious sister-in-law Regina who has come back, more stunning than ever, with an American industrialist lover. Regina may now be willing to aid Berthe in exchange for her freedom. Téchiné’s second film is a mix of black comedy, romantic drama and nostalgia, told in an unsettling inconsistent style. The film traces the lives of its characters through

4576-549: The French side of Lake Geneva . Godard attended school in Nyon , Switzerland. Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of André Malraux 's essay Outline of a Psychology of Cinema , and his reading of La Revue du cinéma , which was relaunched in 1946. In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite. He lodged with

4680-560: The New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history , and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy , and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works. After the New Wave, his politics were less radical, and his later films came to be about human conflict and artistic representation "from

4784-414: The U.S., as well as France. He and Gorin toured with their work, attempting to create discussion, mainly on college campuses. This period came to a climax with the big-budget production Tout Va Bien , which starred Yves Montand and Jane Fonda . Owing to a motorcycle accident that severely incapacitated Godard, Gorin ended up directing this most celebrated of their work together almost single-handedly. As

4888-477: The accolade. Cieply makes reference to Richard Brody 's book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard , and alluded to a previous, longer article published by the Jewish Journal as lying near the origin of the debate. The article also draws upon Brody's book, for example in the following quotation, which Godard made on television in 1981: " Moses is my principal enemy...Moses, when he received

4992-497: The accusations of anti-Semitism. Godard produced several pieces that directly address the Vietnam War . Furthermore, there are two scenes in Pierrot le fou that tackle the issue. The first is a scene that takes place in the initial car ride between Ferdinand (Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). Over the car radio, the two hear the message "garrison massacred by the Viet Cong who lost 115 men". Marianne responds with an extended musing on

5096-428: The anti-hero searching for her murdered lover and the film includes a cameo by Marianne Faithfull . A year later came Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), in which Marina Vlady portrays a woman leading a double life as housewife and prostitute, considered to be "among the greatest achievements in filmmaking." La Chinoise (1967) saw Godard at his most politically forthright so far. The film focused on

5200-497: The autumn of 1957, Pierre Braunberger produced the first film in the series, All the Boys Are Called Patrick , directed by Godard from Rohmer's script. A Story of Water (1958) was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut. In 1958, Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, Charlotte et son Jules ,

5304-487: The blunt good sense they lack, and he arranges for Bethe and Hector to be married. While the bourgeois wives of the two other sons mope and become peevish, Berthe makes herself useful. In the war, she is a heroine of the Resistance; when the business is imperiled by a strike, she settles it by acceding to the workers demands. She takes over the dominant role in management, and becomes the new matriarch as well. In contrast with

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5408-505: The commandments, he saw images and translated them. Then he brought the texts, he didn't show what he had seen. That's why the Jewish people are accursed." Immediately after Cieply's article was published, Brody made a clear point of criticising the "extremely selective and narrow use" of passages in his book, and noted that Godard's work approached the Holocaust with "the greatest moral seriousness". Indeed, his documentaries feature images from

5512-408: The continuity approach. When discussed in reference to classical Hollywood cinema , it may also be referred to as classical continuity . Continuity editing can be divided into two categories: temporal continuity and spatial continuity. Within each category, specific techniques will work against a sense of continuity. In other words, techniques can cause a passage to be continuous, giving the viewer

5616-513: The dam bought the film and used it for publicity purposes. As he continued to work for Cahiers , he made Une femme coquette (1955), a 10-minute short, in Geneva ; and in January 1956 he returned to Paris. A plan for a feature film of Goethe's Elective Affinities proved too ambitious and came to nothing. Truffaut enlisted his help to work on an idea he had for a film based on the true-crime story of

5720-525: The dam, he moved to the post of telephone switchboard operator. While on duty, in April 1954, he put through a call to Laubscher which relayed the fact that Odile Monod, Godard's mother, had died in a scooter accident. Thanks to Swiss friends who lent him a 35 mm movie camera, he was able to shoot on 35mm film. He rewrote the commentary that Laubscher had written, and gave his film a rhyming title Opération béton ( Operation Concrete ). The company that administered

5824-434: The end of the take (while the actors are coming out of character). Week End 's enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads "End of Cinema", appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard's filmmaking career. Godard was known for his "highly political voice", and regularly featured political content in his films. One of his earliest features, Le petit soldat , which dealt with

5928-415: The era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs ." His foray into films began in the field of criticism . Along with Maurice Schérer (writing under the to-be-famous pseudonym Éric Rohmer ) and Jacques Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal La Gazette du cinéma  [ fr ] , which saw the publication of five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded

6032-605: The fall of 1952, Godard returned to Switzerland and went to live with his mother in Lausanne. He became friendly with his mother's lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, who was a labourer on the Grande Dixence Dam . Through Laubscher he secured work himself as a construction worker at the Plaz Fleuri work site at the dam. He saw the possibility of making a documentary film about the dam; when his initial contract ended, to prolong his time at

6136-439: The film during the planning phase for Pierrot le Fou (1965). In 1965, Godard directed Alphaville , a futuristic blend of science fiction, film noir , and satire. Eddie Constantine starred as Lemmy Caution , a detective who is sent into a city controlled by a giant computer named Alpha 60. His mission is to make contact with Professor von Braun ( Howard Vernon ), a famous scientist who has fallen mysteriously silent, and

6240-650: The film stock as "inherently racist" since it did not reflect the variety, nuance or complexity in dark brown or dark skin . This was because Kodak Shirley cards were only made for Caucasian subjects, a problem that was not rectified until 1995. In 1972, Godard and his life partner, Swiss filmmaker, Anne-Marie Miéville started the alternative video production and distribution company Sonimage, based in Grenoble . Under Sonimage, Godard produced Comment ca va , Numéro Deux (1975) and Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980). In 1976, Godard and Miéville, his future wife, collaborated on

6344-432: The film, describes it as a "sociological study of the alienation of the modern woman". The period which spans from May 1968 into the 1970s has been given various labels—from his "militant" period, to his "radical" period, along with terms as specific as " Maoist " and as vague as "political". In any case, the period saw Godard employ consistent revolutionary rhetoric in his films and in his public statements. Inspired by

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6448-487: The film: " Marvelous". "Téchiné and Goldin (the screenwriter) may not know anything except movies, but the way they know movies is enough for me". Jean-Luc Godard Jean-Luc Godard ( UK : / ˈ ɡ ɒ d ɑː / GOD -ar , US : / ɡ oʊ ˈ d ɑːr / goh- DAR ; French: [ʒɑ̃ lyk ɡɔdaʁ] ; 3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as

6552-506: The first of a series of more mainstream films marked by autobiographical currents: it was followed by Passion , Lettre à Freddy Buache (both 1982), Prénom Carmen (1983), and Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma (1986). There was, though, another flurry of controversy with Je vous salue, Marie (1985), which was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for alleged heresy , and also with King Lear (1987),

6656-474: The flaming silhouettes of Gone with the Wind to The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem . French Provincial was a show case piece for legendary French actress Jeanne Moreau. Despite the fact that her character in the film scarcely seems to age over a 30-year period, she appears perfectly at ease with this style of drama and shows a surprising comic flair in some scenes. Famous critic Pauline Kael called

6760-399: The history of film itself. In 2001, Éloge de l'amour ( In Praise of Love ) was released. The film is notable for its use of both film and video—the first half captured in 35 mm black and white, the latter half shot in color on DV —and subsequently transferred to film for editing. The film is also noted for containing themes of ageing, love, separation, and rediscovery as it follows

6864-610: The influential critical magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951 (a seminal publication on cinema and its main observers and participants), Godard was the first of the younger critics from the CCQL/Cinémathèque group to be published. The January 1952 issue featured his review of an American melodrama directed by Rudolph Maté , No Sad Songs for Me . His "Defence and Illustration of Classical Découpage" published in September 1952, in which he attacks an earlier article by Bazin and defends

6968-551: The innovative use of jump cuts (which were traditionally considered amateurish), character asides , and breaking the eyeline match in continuity editing . Another unique aspect of Breathless was the spontaneous writing of the script on the day of shooting—a technique that the actors found unsettling—which contribute to the spontaneous, documentary-like ambiance of the film. From the beginning of his career, Godard included more film references in his movies than any of his New Wave colleagues. In Breathless , his citations include

7072-480: The most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by Filmmaker magazine. In a 2002 Sight & Sound poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time. He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard

7176-479: The name Karl Marx is cited in conjunction with figures such as Jesus Christ . A constant refrain throughout Godard's cinematic period is that of the bourgeoisie's consumerism , the commodification of daily life and activity, and man's alienation —all central features of Marx's critique of capitalism . In an essay on Godard, philosopher and aesthetics scholar Jacques Rancière states, "When in Pierrot le fou , 1965,

7280-465: The next two years due to its political nature. The 'little soldier' Bruno Forestier was played by Michel Subor . Forestier was a character close to Godard himself, an image-maker and intellectual, 'more or less my spokesman, but not totally' Godard told an interviewer. The film begins on 13 May 1958, the date of the attempted putsch in Algeria , and ends later the same month. In the film, Bruno Forestier,

7384-509: The notion of what a film can be. In addition to abandoning mainstream filmmaking, Godard also tried to escape the cult of personality that had formed around him. He worked anonymously in collaboration with other filmmakers, most notably Jean-Pierre Gorin , with whom he formed the Dziga-Vertov cinema collective. During this period Godard made films in England, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Palestine, and

7488-621: The period of Nazi occupation to the present day, but their story is secondary. The focus of the film is the family-owned factory. We see its birth, its maturing, and its decline, as if it were a living thing. Around it, times change, the people change, social attitudes and hair-styles change, but the factory remains there, immutable and indifferent. The film’s style mingles European and American directors Godard , Bernardo Bertolucci , Orson Welles , William Wyler , Jean Cocteau Alfred Hitchcock , Jacques Tati among others. The flashback sequence of Pedret’s youth wings from Wuthering Heights and

7592-442: The practical Berthe, Regina, her sister in law, is flighty. Dark and beautiful, Regina is married to Prosper, Pédret’s youngest son and the only one with a college education. But Regina and the handsome, refined Prosper are a mismatch. A rapacious dreamer, Regina, fed up with the dull austerity of provincial society, runs off with an American soldier. Eventually, Berthe comes to control the family's fortunes, but economic challenges in

7696-462: The previously discussed match on action, spatial continuity is attainable. However, if wishing to convey a disjointed space, or spatial discontinuity, aside from purposefully contradicting the continuity tools, one can take advantage of crosscutting and the jump cut . Cross-cutting is a technique which conveys an undeniable spatial discontinuity. It can be achieved by cutting back and forth between shots of spatially unrelated places. In these cases,

7800-478: The production went ahead. The film's importance was recognised immediately, and in January 1960 Godard won the Jean Vigo Prize , awarded "to encourage an auteur of the future". One reviewer mentioned Alexandre Astruc 's prophecy of the age of the caméra-stylo , the camera that a new generation would use with the efficacy with which a writer uses his pen—"here is in fact the first work authentically written with

7904-399: The scene and its corresponding visuals to be anything but temporally continuous. Match on action technique can preserve temporal continuity where there is a uniform, unrepeated physical motion or change within a passage. A match on the action is when some action occurring before the temporally questionable cut is picked up where the cut left it by the shot immediately following. For example,

8008-476: The script for an adaptation of Homer 's Odyssey , which the Austrian director Fritz Lang has been filming. Lang's ' high culture ' interpretation of the story is lost on Prokosch, whose character is a firm indictment of the commercial motion picture hierarchy. In 1964, Godard and Karina formed a production company, Anouchka Films. He directed Bande à part ( Band of Outsiders ), another collaboration between

8112-623: The soundtrack— Mozart , Picasso , J. S. Bach , Paul Klee , and Auguste Renoir . "This first-person cinema invoked not the director's experience but his presence". Godard wanted to hire the American actress Jean Seberg, who was living in Paris with her husband François Moreuil, a lawyer, to play the American woman. Seberg had become famous in 1956 when Otto Preminger had chosen her to play Joan of Arc in his Saint Joan , and had then cast her in his 1958 adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse . Her performance in this film had not been generally regarded as

8216-405: The space in which the action is occurring. Its theory is that it is difficult for a viewer to become disoriented when all the story space is presented before him. The establishing shot can be used at any time as a reestablishing shot. This might be necessary when a complex sequence of cuts may have served to disorient the viewer. One way of preventing viewer disorientation in editing is to adhere to

8320-422: The spectacle of life is intermingled with its analysis". He was very conscious of the way he wished to portray the human being. His efforts are overtly characteristic of Marx, who in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 gives one of his most nuanced elaborations, analysing how the worker is alienated from his product, the object of his productive activity. Georges Sadoul , in his short rumination on

8424-487: The two and described by him as " Alice in Wonderland meets Franz Kafka ." It follows two young men, looking to score on a heist, who both fall in love with Karina, and quotes from several gangster film conventions. While promoting the film, Godard wrote that according to D. W. Griffith , all one needs to make a film is "a girl and a gun." Une femme mariée ( A Married Woman , 1964) followed Band of Outsiders . It

8528-401: The unusual step of writing dialogue every day and calling the lines to the actors during filming – a technique made possible by filming without direct sound and dubbing dialogue in post-production. His following film was Les Carabiniers , based on a story by Roberto Rossellini , one of Godard's influences. The film follows two peasants who join the army of a king, only to find futility in

8632-448: The use of the dissolve or the fade , one may allude to the relative duration of ellipses where the dissolve sustains a visual link but the fade to black does not. It cannot be argued that one constitutes short ellipsis and the other long however, as this negates the very functional ambiguity created by such transitions. Ambiguity is removed through the use of captions and intertitles such as "three weeks later" if desired. The flashback

8736-590: The use of the shot–reverse shot technique, is one of his earliest important contributions to cinema criticism. Praising Otto Preminger and "the greatest American artist— Howard Hawks ", Godard raises their harsh melodramas above the more "formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles , De Sica , and Wyler which Bazin endorsed". At this point Godard's activities did not include making films. Rather, he watched films, and wrote about them, and helped others make films, notably Rohmer, with whom he worked on Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak . Having left Paris in

8840-491: The viewer ( Verfremdungseffekt ) through a radical separation of the elements of the medium (theatre in Brecht's case, but in Godard's, film). Brecht's influence is keenly felt through much of Godard's work, particularly before 1980, when Godard used cinematic expression for specific political ends. For example, Breathless 's elliptical editing, which denies the viewer a fluid narrative typical of mainstream cinema, forces

8944-405: The viewer will understand clearly that the places are supposed to be separate and parallel. So in that sense, the viewer may not become particularly disoriented, but under the principle of spatial continuity editing, crosscutting is considered a technique of spatial discontinuity. The jump cut is undoubtedly a device of disorientation. The jump cut is a cut between two shots that are so similar that

9048-461: The viewer's attention to a pre-existing consistency of story across both time and physical location. Often used in feature films, continuity editing, or "cutting to continuity", can be contrasted with approaches such as montage , with which the editor aims to generate, in the mind of the viewer, new associations among the various shots that can then be of entirely different subjects, or at least of subjects less closely related than would be required for

9152-509: The viewers to take on more critical roles, connecting the pieces themselves and coming away with more investment in the work's content. In many of his most political pieces, specifically Week-end , Pierrot le Fou , and La Chinoise , characters address the audience with thoughts, feelings, and instructions. A Marxist reading is possible with most if not all of Godard's early work. Godard's direct interaction with Marxism does not become explicitly apparent, however, until Week End , where

9256-407: The violence and loneliness that lie so close to happiness today. It's very much a film about France." Masculin Féminin (1966), based on two Guy de Maupassant stories, La Femme de Paul and Le Signe , was a study of contemporary French youth and their involvement with cultural politics. An intertitle refers to the characters as "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola ." Although Godard's cinema

9360-876: The way the radio dehumanises the Northern Vietnamese combatants. The war is present throughout the film in mentions, allusions, and depictions in newsreel footage, and the film's style was affected by Godard's political anger at the war, upsetting his ability to draw from earlier cinematic styles. Notably, he also participated in Loin du Vietnam (1967). An anti-war project, it consists of seven sketches directed by Godard (who used stock footage from La Chinoise ), Claude Lelouch , Joris Ivens , William Klein , Chris Marker , Alain Resnais , and Agnès Varda . Godard's engagement with German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht stems primarily from his attempt to transpose Brecht's theory of epic theatre and its prospect of alienating

9464-428: The whole thing as the king reveals the deception of war-administrating leaders. His final film of 1963 and the most commercially successful film of his career was Le Mépris ( Contempt ), starring Michel Piccoli and one of France's biggest female stars, Brigitte Bardot . The film follows Paul (Piccoli), a screenwriter who is commissioned by Prokosch ( Jack Palance ), an arrogant American movie producer, to rewrite

9568-547: The writer Jean Schlumberger . Having failed his baccalauréat exam in 1948, he returned to Switzerland. He studied in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He spent time in Geneva also with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco. His elder sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, which he did, in an abstract style. After time spent at

9672-636: The young artist Edgar in his contemplation of a new work on the four stages of love. In Notre musique (2004), Godard turned his focus to war, specifically, the war in Sarajevo , but with attention to all war, including the American Civil War , the war between the U.S. and Native Americans , and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict . The film is structured into three Dantean kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise . Godard's fascination with paradox

9776-438: Was a slow, deliberate, toned-down black-and-white picture without a real story. The film was shot in four weeks and was "an explicitly and stringently modernist film". It showed Godard's "engagement with the most advanced thinking of the day, as expressed in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes " and its fragmentation and abstraction reflected also "his loss of faith in the familiar Hollywood styles." Godard made

9880-637: Was awarded an Academy Honorary Award . Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris , the son of Odile ( née Monod) and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, and his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas . She was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod . Other relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod , naturalist Théodore Monod , and pastor Frédéric Monod . On his father's side, he

9984-565: Was founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936; Work and Culture was a workers' education group for which André Bazin had organised wartime film screenings and discussions and which had become a model for the film clubs that had risen throughout France after the Liberation; CCQL, founded in about 1947 or 1948, was animated and intellectually led by Maurice Schérer . At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette , Claude Chabrol , and François Truffaut . Godard

10088-441: Was in debt from two productions based on Pierre Loti stories; hence, financing came instead from a film distributor, René Pignières. Godard's most celebrated period as a director spans roughly from his first feature, Breathless (1960), through to Week End (1967). His work during this period focused on relatively conventional films that often refer to different aspects of film history. Although Godard's work during this time

10192-487: Was in the context of a joke, a piece of art, or a relationship, presented to be used as tools of reference, romanticising the Marxist rhetoric, rather than being solely tools of education. Une femme mariée is also structured around Marx's concept of commodity fetishism . Godard once said that it is "a film in which individuals are considered as things, in which chases in a taxi alternate with ethological interviews, in which

10296-423: Was known for a series of radical documentaries titled " Kino Pravda " (literally, "film truth") and the late silent-era feature film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Vertov was also a contemporary of both Soviet montage theorists, notably Sergei Eisenstein , and Russian constructivist and avant-garde artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin . Part of Godard's political shift after May 1968

10400-399: Was one of his most popular among critics. Karina starred as Nana, an errant mother and aspiring actress whose financially strained circumstances lead her to the life of a streetwalker . It is an episodic account of her rationalisations to prove she is free, even though she is tethered at the end of her pimp 's short leash. In one scene, within a café, she spreads her arms out and announces she

10504-471: Was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case anymore. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope.... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe , but not Dreyer . ... We watched silent films in

10608-447: Was reconsidered, he began to collaborate with like-minded individuals in the filmmaking arena. His most notable collaborator was Jean-Pierre Gorin , a Maoist student of Louis Althusser , Michel Foucault , and Jacques Lacan , who later became a professor of Film Studies at the University of California at San Diego , with a passion for cinema that attracted Godard's attention. Between 1968 and 1973, Godard and Gorin collaborated to make

10712-504: Was the legendary French singer and actor Yves Montand , who had appeared in prestigious films by Georges Clouzot , Alain Résnais, Sacha Guitry , Vincente Minelli , George Cukor , and Costa-Gavras . The small group of Maoists that Godard had brought together, which included Gorin, adopted the name Dziga Vertov Group. Godard had a specific interest in Dziga Vertov , a Soviet filmmaker—who

10816-566: Was toward a proactive participation in the class struggle and he drew inspiration from filmmakers associated with the Russian Revolution . Towards the end of this period of his life, Godard began to feel disappointed with his Maoist ideals and was abandoned by his wife at the time, Anne Wiazemsky. In this context, according to biographer Antoine de Baecque, Godard attempted suicide on two occasions. Godard returned to somewhat more traditional fiction with Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980),

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